France, 1945
In France, Max was feeling better by the day. The improvement felt traitorous, as if he was scorning those who had died. His good health seemed to him at times a mockery of his family. He told Magda as much, when she was asking for his forgiveness for not recovering faster.
“We could be anywhere by now, if not for me,” she said.
Max squeezed her bony hand. “I wish I wasn’t better yet. Your state is more fitting to everything than my sufficiently increasing health is.”
To his surprise, she frowned at that. “Don’t feel guilty, Max. Your family loved you. They would want you to be improving. They’d want everything good to happen to you.”
Max could not see how anything good could ever come his way, but he kept silent.
“I’d like for us to stay together,” he said.
Her talk of happiness gave him the courage to say that. He’d meant to say it to her this whole time. Since he saw her again for the first time since Berlin. Max could not believe Magda, his Magda, the one girl he’d ever been interested in like that , had stood right there. He’d stared at her through the barbed wire as if she would dissolve in front of his eyes without a trace like morning dew. Skeletal, gray-pale and bald, it was nevertheless his Magda. There was no mistaking her, not for Max who had her memorized. All those years during the war, seeing her alive for the first time had been one of his precious few moments of relief. After finding her like that, against all odds, how could he leave her?
At first she said nothing in response to the idea of staying together. Did she take what he said the wrong way? Did she think he was too presumptuous? When she smiled a tired smile he could finally breathe again.
“Yes,” Magda said. “Together. I think I shall put you in my pocket so you don’t leave me again.”
Max could have pointed out that when they went their separate ways after Berlin, that was hardly his choice. Both of them had been children and their families left the city in search of safety. Magda’s family went with a group of Romani people, and Max’s family went alone in search of a Jewish community in Poland where they could find safety in numbers. That was before the ghettos, before the annexation. Magda and her companions tried to get to Russia, where Anya, Magda’s mother, was from.
They told Max he had to leave the hospital soon. There were many French, British, and American soldiers who needed urgent care and France had only so many beds in its depleted hospitals. He explained about Magda, that if he left, he was fearful he might never see her again. The nurses and doctors knew who he meant. The redhead girl with a sweet temper. Quiet, never a word of complaint. Max did not explain that after what they survived, maybe nothing would ever seem all that terrible by comparison. She had pneumonia and was so weak with it she could barely stand. Normally young women did not succumb to such an ordinary and easy illness, but Magda had been weak already, from years of starvation and forced labour. Adding an illness to her condition, even a minor one, had devastating consequences. He did not think she would die, but Max had no intention of dragging her out of the country before she made a full recovery. Even the doctors wanted her to stay put. It was Max they wanted gone. They understood the precarious situation, but they simply had no capacity to take care of a patient who was well enough to leave. In the end, they let him stay on as an employee instead of a patient. His jobs included glamorous tasks like emptying bedpans and mopping urine-covered floors. The only way they let this happen was if he found a place to live. It was an easy lie. He begged a woman who owned a nearby hotel to sign the paper stating that he had lodgings with her. She agreed a little after the third time he swore up and down he’d give her some coin for her trouble as soon as he earned any. Indeed, the first little sum of money the hospital gave him he gave to the lady. Luckily he could sneak a little food from the hospital cafeteria. It wasn’t as though he was used to a full stomach. He saved the money for train fare. Magda was getting stronger. Soon they could leave France. It was a beautiful country for sure. But he barely spoke a little French and Magda didn’t at all. They’d never get jobs that way and everything was so expensive here. When he brought up the topic, she said she would have liked to stay in France. They decided if they saved up some money and learned the language, they might try to make a life for themselves here. Someday.
Right now, merely being in France felt like a mistake. When Magda had realized other displaced persons, as governments around the world were calling them, weren't being transferred to hospitals in France like the two of them were, she asked him why they received this special treatment. He said he didn't know. Clerical error, but a happy one, for once. Best not to question it. He could not tell her that a silly, flag-wearing American and a short, gruff Canadian arranged it.
“So where would you want to go?” he asked her.
“I’m not sure,” Magda said. Where would you? Do you want to go home? That’s what some people are doing.”
Max shook his head. “I don’t. In fact, I don’t think I’ll want to go back to Germany as long as I live.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she said.
“Is that what you want? To go home? For you I will. Where you go, I go.”
She looked at him in disbelief. “No. Sometimes I wonder what it’s like over there now that things are slowly becoming normal again, but what’s the use? I know it’s not the same as it was before they destroyed everything that was decent, everything that made our country worthwhile.”
Max understood how she felt. He would have wanted his old life back. His family back. He’d have loved to live in the Berlin he knew when he was very little, before things got irrevocably bad.
“It will never be the way it was.”
“No,” Magda agreed. Her eyes were sad.
They decided to go somewhere people spoke Russian because Magda spoke it, though not fluently. Other than his little French, Max knew a bit of English, but Britain was also too expensive and America felt impossible. Somehow Russia seemed more frightening to Magda than the Ukraine did. It was probably because Russia had been the place her grandparents fled in order to look for a better life. While she had been a patient at the hospital, Max earned enough money to get train tickets to Vinnytsia, a city in west-central Ukraine, and to get them lodgings for a few nights. Even food included, they had about a week to find jobs in Vinnytsia. They chose the place because Magda’s family spoke of it fondly back in Berlin, before the world ended. An aunt lived in Vinnytsia, and Magda’s mother liked visiting there when she was a girl. No, it was a cousin. Well, it didn’t matter. Some family relation used to enjoy living there. That was enough to make it feel like they were following the yellow brick road to the wizard from that ridiculous movie a nurse at the hospital often talked about.